A Real Cool Hand

Life's mysteries start to reveal themselves when you discuss "Cool Hand Luke." It just happens that way. Maybe because Paul Newman was a bad ass. Maybe because one of the all-time great movies is just packed full of an attitude that most of us could use a whole lot more of.

The title scene of the movie, Newman and some other inmates are playing poker. The betting is getting high. People are folding rather than chancing losing. Newman keeps going all in. Wins the hand. When he shows his cards, he had nothing. He bluffed his way through it. His friend calls him out for having nothing. Newman pops a beer and says one of the greatest lines ever spoken on screen:

"Sometimes nothin' is a real cool hand."

I have heard folks complain about the hand, the cards life dealt them. Not third world country poor folks, not homeless folks, but folks who have things in their lives that some would kill for. But more to the point, it's not about the cards you were dealt, but how you play them; what you do with them.

If life is a poker game (and not a box of chocolates) and you get crap cards and fold right off, then you have no one to blame but yourself. Play them for everything you can. Because you know what? Maybe the person with the best hand is afraid to lose, afraid to play it. It's not the cards, it's the attitude. It's what you do with what you've got.

And that got me to thinking, about the cards we are dealt, Life cards. Maybe that's God as dealer's big joke. Maybe we are all dealt EXACTLY the same hand of cards. And we all walk around with them close to the vest, letting only ourselves see them. When if we play them, we learn we don't lose. These are meta cards people, you're not playing for the cash in your wallet.

Newman's attitude in Cool Hand Luke made being in prison an adventure for him and those around him. He didn't mope around and go into a funk. He ate 50 eggs. He boxed the biggest dude there and wouldn't quit. He won a poker game with a nothing hand.

What if we brought more of that attitude to our own lives? What if we had the stones/balls/guts to play our hand to the fullest? We could learn a bit from Lucas Jackson. Play your cards, whatever they are, and what they are likely won't matter. It's in the playing.

Fire, Phoenix, Fork

I'm not going to set anything on fire. Not in real life. It's a figurative fire, we're talking Meta-fire here. Maybe.

Astrology is not nearly as cool a word as alchemy. Everyone knows, speaking Zodiac, what their sign is. An April 8 guy like myself, Aries. But if you change glasses and look into alchemical signs, you're exploring things a bit differently. Alchemists go back to the elements: air, fire, water, earth. An Aries like myself is fire as an element, fire representing action and creativity perhaps.

Once you've got your element figured, you look at modalities: beginning/initiation (cardinal), middle/sustaining (fixed), and end/change (mutable). So sticking with Aries, you're talking beginning of the spring season, Aries is Cardinal Fire. Maybe that explains me getting divebombed by cardinals during my runs? ;)

It's funny to think of fire having spent most of my life by the water. Then again, I intuitively feel like an outsider almost anywhere I go, on the fringes, the edges, looking in, looking out. Just out of place. Fire at a water party.

But fire has been on my mind a lot lately. Creative fire, but also destructive fire. And the way I've been pondering it, is best embodied by a legend/myth I learned as a kid: the phoenix. The phoenix is a great fiery bird, who is born of the ashes of the one before it. It is created from the ashes, the death of the one before it. It rises, is reborn. But you don't have the fiery new life without the incineration of the old one.

That is what this spring and summer has felt like. The ending of something, the rebirth, the beginning of something else. And so I'm thinking shit like that, minding my own business, and the album of the last few months for me has been Audioslave's first album, self-titled. And I'm driving to work, listening to "Show Me How to Live," and snag this thought from Mr. Cornell:

And in your final hours I will stand, ready to begin

And I happened to be pondering the phoenix (which will be a future tattoo by the way) when I heard that, and the cycle, the end and ready to begin. So there's that.

The other album that's been getting some air from me is Jack White's "Lazaretto." Typical White: lo-fi, raw, uneven, Nashville in places, tangential in others. Guitar and piano and lyrics that frequently make you think. And as White is singing along, he throws this gem out there as a way to woo a lady perhaps:

Put a fork in the road with me.

And, hold up, what? Instead of choosing a direction at a fork in the road, PUT a fork in the road. And man, I dig the hell out of that. Let's create possibilities. Let's expand things. Create choices. Not limit ourselves, expand ourselves. And I dig that.

So that's what the coffee says the last couple mornings. Cardinal Fire. Beginnings. Endings. Beginnings out of Endings. Phoenixes. Big-ass fiery mythical birds. Screaming guitar riffs. And putting forks in roads. Possibilities. All towards the creative unfolding of how things go. Set it off.